Re: A lovely comment

[Hans Åberg]

> On 23 Jan 2021, at 00:36, Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
> 
> On 1/13/21 1:28 AM, Hans Åberg wrote:
>> My first computer was a SWTPC 6800 at 980 KHz!
> 
> Hah, the first computer I used was a GE 225 codesigned by Steven Spielberg's 
> father. It took 36 µs to add two integers, and its memory cycle time was 21 
> µs. Its RAM had only 8,192 20-bit words, which I had to share with up to 19 
> other simultaneous users.

The original comment was about a computer one had, not merely used; nice 
comment anyway. :-) The SWTPC 6800 was the first personal RAM memory computer 
with ROM sufficiently large that one did not have to bootstrap it when powering 
it on. Earlier, I had used a computer with core memory, a small box with iron 
rings that are magnetized, using punched tape rather than cards, but the latter 
I saw a use of in the late 1980s, at a helpdesk, the helpers having a strange 
facial expression.